The Ballad of Lonesome George (cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2001

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The Ballad of Lonesome George (cont.)

GOATS AND PIGS, FIRST BROUGHT to the Galápagos in the 16th century by pirates and other sailors, still infest several islands, and Isabela is also home to feral dogs, cattle, and cats. With no natural predators to keep them in check, the goats raze whole hillsides of vegetation, threatening plant species, causing erosion, and wiping out the food sources of the giant tortoise. Pigs destroy the nests of marine turtles; dogs and cats kill land iguanas; black rats are wiping out native rice rats. During the 1960s and 1970s, goats were eradicated on several of the smaller islands, and Floreana was cleared of dogs. But on the larger islands, with their impenetrable areas of dense brush and razor-sharp lava fields—Isabela alone is 75 miles long—the process of elimination could take decades.

Hunters hired by the park laboriously track down and shoot every feral pig on an island before going after the goats (the logic being that if they killed the goats first, heavy vegetation would grow back, providing cover for pigs). To track the goats, so fleet of foot and hard to find, park hunters outfit a single animal—the "Judas goat"—with a radio collar; it leads them to the wary but naturally social herds.

In an attempt to reverse some of the damage wrought by introduced species, Lindblad Expeditions created the Galápagos Conservation Fund in 1997 to raise money from its passengers for special conservation projects. The fund had more than a half-million dollars by the end of last year, and one of the major projects it sponsors is the pig-eradication program on San Salvador. Tom O'Brien, Lindblad's director of environmental affairs, neatly captures the paradoxical fact that tourists bring both peril and promise to the region: "If tourism hadn't put such a high value on the Galápagos, I don't think there'd be a hope that it would be protected by Ecuador or the international community." As for the pigs, he says that scientists believe "there is only one shrewd juvenile male left" on San Salvador.

The islands have harbored other, more highly-prized survivors, like the tortoise Lonesome George, the tragicomic symbol of the devastation caused by nonnatives. George is the last of his Pinta Island subspecies, a male of many friends but no lovers. Last seen in 1906, the subspecies was long thought to be extinct, but Georgewas discovered there in 1971 and brought to live at the Darwin Station, while scientists searched the world's zoos for a possible girlfriend. Although there's a $10,000 reward for a Pinta female, none has been found, and George, who's been keeping company in a corral with two females from Isabela (genetically the closest match), has never shown the slightest interest in sexual encounters with them or anyone else, including a female researcher who tried to gratify him manually in order to get a sperm sample. George is about 70 years old, in the prime of his life, and could live another hundred years. Slowly prowling his capacious and beautifully appointed pen, complete with wading pool, he's a fearsome-looking 194-pound beast, seemingly unresigned to his fate. Perhaps because of his high saddle-back, his neck seems grotesquely elongated, his old-man's eyes sunk deep in his head above his beaky mouth. With our goats and our carelessness, we've done this to him, and he doesn't look happy about it.

George's Espanola relatives have been more fortunate. In the midsixties, the Park Service removed the few endangered giant tortoises left on Española (a unique saddle-back subspecies endemic to that island) and bred them at the Darwin Station; since then, more than a thousand young tortoises have been returned to the island. But this success is one of the few bright spots in the sordid human history of the Galápagos.

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